VMware Cloud on AWS is now available across the U.S. It also includes new capabilities such as live migration and disaster-recovery-as-a-service, the companies announced today at AWS re:Invent 2017.

The hybrid cloud service first launched over the summer at VMworld 2017 but was only available in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) U.S. West (Oregon) region. It allows VMware customers to run their workloads in the AWS public cloud using the same VMware software stack.  It’s now available in the AWS U.S. East (Virginia) region as well, and plans for a global expansion are on track for 2018, said Ivan Oprencak, director, product marketing at VMware.

The partners also added a handful of new features that Oprencak believes will make it easier for customers to migrate and protect mission-critical applications at scale.

One of those services is live migration capabilities, provided through vMotion. This allows enterprises to move live applications without any disruption. It’s slated to be available by February 2018.

“VMotion allows customers to take any VM [virtual machine] they have on premises and migrate it into VMware Cloud on AWS while it is running,” Oprencak said. This new feature is supported by two existing technologies: VMware’s NSX network virtualization platform and AWS Direct Connect, which gives customers a direct, private connection between their on-premises data center and AWS.

The VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension service is another add-on that will be available by February. This software-as-a-service (SaaS) will provide large-scale migration between on-premises environments running vSphere 5.0+ and VMware Cloud on AWS. It will allow customers to keep the same networks, IP, and routing policies in place while moving workloads to VMware Cloud on AWS.

“If you do have a large number of workloads, this makes it faster and more efficient to migrate workloads,” Oprencak said. “Where this technology really shines is when you are talking about migrating multiple VMs in parallel while they are still running. With vMotion, you get to do one at a time while it's running; with this you can move 16 workloads.”

Another add-on, VMware Site Recovery, provides disaster recovery without application re-architecture. It allows enterprises to replicate and maintain data either between private data centers and VMware Cloud on AWS, or between two VMware Cloud on AWS environments running in separate AWS availability zones.

This disaster recovery is available today as a separate add-on and is priced per protected VM with hourly metering.

And finally, VMware is adding support for Wavefront, a cloud service that allows application teams to visualize, receive alerts about, and troubleshoot applications running on VMware Cloud on AWS. Wavefront provides an open API platform supporting more than 80 integrations to collect time-series data from application metrics collectors such as for Java, Ruby, Python, and Go, to service metrics collectors for MySQL, Pivotal, Kubernetes, and AWS, among others. This support is also available today.

In addition to new services, VMware Cloud on AWS also now supports large-scale environments and resource-intensive workloads. Enterprise applications such as Oracle, Oracle RAC, Microsoft SQL Server, Apache Spark, and Hadoop have been tested and run successfully on VMware Cloud on AWS, according to VMware.

VMware Cloud on AWS supports 32 host clusters and multiple software-defined data centers (SDDC) per organization today, with support for multiple clusters (10 clusters per SDDC) “coming soon.” This, the company claims, will enable a single customer to support environments as large as tens of thousands of VMs.